From chapter five The Winter of our Discontent- John Steinbeck
I commissioned my fingers and thought about the attic of the old Hawley house, my house, my attic. It is not a dark and spidery prison for the broken and abandoned. It has windows with small panes so old that the light comes through lavender and the outside is wavery—like a world seen through water. The books stored there are not waiting to be thrown out or given to the Seamen’s Institute. They sit comfortably on their shelves waiting to be
rediscovered. And the chairs, some unfashionable for a time, some rump-sprung, are large and soft. It is not a dusty place either. Housecleaning is
attic-cleaning also, and since it is mostly closed away, dust does not enter. I remember as a child scrambling among the brilliants of books or,
battered with agonies, or in the spectral half-life that requires loneliness, retiring to the attic, to lie curled in a great body-molded chair in the violetlavender
light from the window. There I could study the big adze-squared beams that support the roof—see how they are mortised one into another
and pinned in place with oaken dowels. When it rains from rustling drip to roar on the roof, it is a fine secure place. Then the books, tinted with light,
the picture books of children grown, seeded, and gone; Chatterboxes and the Rollo series; a thousand acts of God—Fire, Flood, Tidal Waves,
Earthquakes—all fully illustrated; the Gustave Doré Hell, with Dante’s squared cantos like bricks between; and the heartbreaking stories of Hans
Christian Andersen, the blood-chilling violence and cruelty of the Grimm Brothers, the Morte d’Arthur of majesty with drawings by Aubrey Beardsley,
a sickly, warped creature, a strange choice to illustrate great, manly Malory.
I remember thinking how wise a man was H. C. Andersen. The king told his secrets down a well, and his secrets were safe. A man who tells
secrets or stories must think of who is hearing or reading, for a story has as many versions as it has readers. Everyone takes what he wants or can
from it and thus changes it to his measure. Some pick out parts and reject the rest, some strain the story through their mesh of prejudice, some
paint it with their own delight. A story must have some points of contact with the reader to make him feel at home in it. Only then can he accept the wonders.
